It was an ugly moment in an otherwise charming town, which made it all the more memorable. It wasn’t much, just a drunk guy being weird in a bar, hardly a unique thing, but who he was and how it played out was. I’d only been in North Platte for ten hours and was already charmed by it — the tranquil get-things-done functionality, the wide-open low-slung beauty of the surrounding plains, the non-ironic kitschiness. Sure it had the usual stretch of banality, the franchises and strip malls orbiting a massive Walmart, but even that felt different, empty of the despondent. It seemed a town preserved in amber from an idyllic cinematic past. Not only did it have working grain elevators and mile-long freight trains, but it had the world’s largest rail-yard with good jobs that didn’t require a college degree from a far away institution.
I’d gone into the bar wondering why wouldn’t you want to live here? It was late afternoon and the only other customer was an African man, slumped over his beer, staring at me. He looked out of place in so many ways. I quickly pegged him as central African, probably south Sudanese, because although I’d not seen the meat-packing plant, I’d smelled it, and I’ve been around enough of them to know he was here for that work. Hard, dangerous, and degrading work that “even the Mexicans have moved on from1”, and was now a landing spot for recent refugees from central and east Africa and the Caribbean, and Nebraska had its share of the former.
The bartender was an affable middle-aged black woman, who had moved to North Platte from Georgia over a decade before, to raise a family in a ‘town where you can let your children play outside without worrying about them being shot or getting into drugs.’
She was spending most of her time monitoring her two children, doing their homework at the front table, eating their dinner of hamburger and fries. I nodded to the man, raised my glass to him, but he didn’t respond, and kept staring straight at me, then he got up and staggered over to the front table, standing inches away from the young girl, who looked up at him with a quizzical smile. He tried saying something to her, but between his intoxication and limited English it didn’t make its way out, not in any way anyone could understand.
That brought over the bartender, who scolded him, “Hey, leave my daughter alone.” He looked at her, didn’t change his expression, and tried again to talk to the girl, and again it failed, and he stood there for minutes, mute, just staring at her, and he tried again to talk, but again nothing decipherable, and then he reached out to put his hand on her shoulder, and that is when the bartender ran out from behind the bar, and grabbed him, spinning him around. ‘No. I said no. Do you hear me? Do you understand English? Do you know what no means? You hear me? Leave her alone.’
This repeated again, and this time she upped the volume and anger, ‘You don’t want to see the bad side of my black ass, I will go ghetto on you so fast. Now leave before I do. You’re done. Get out’ and she pointed to the door, and he stood there not saying anything, looking at her with that blank expression for far longer than he should have, and then finally headed towards the door and when she had begun to retreat back to the bar he turned around and again went up to the daughter and again reached out to touch her shoulder, her looking at him confused, not scared, trying to make out what he was saying, and then the bartender was between the two, grabbing his shoulder, and pushing him towards the door, ‘That’s it. I’m calling the police. You hear? You understand?’ she said, pulling out her phone and waving it in his face. ‘Get out. I’ve told you to leave my children alone. Don’t you understand? You’re not in Africa anymore. We have rules here. You can’t go around touching anyone’s children. You hear me? Leave now or I’m calling and will get you deported so fast you won’t know what hit you. You hear? Go. Don’t mess with me.’2
That didn’t phase him, didn’t change his expression at all, but he did eventually leave, standing in the doorway for several minutes, walked by a few times peering into the window, tried to enter again, before she went out on the sidewalk and yelled, before turning to her children, and me, exasperated, ‘Did you see that? Who does he think he is?’
“Have you seen him before?” I asked.
‘No. This is why we didn’t want the plant. You see who it brings here? They shouldn’t be here. They don’t know how to behave. This isn’t Africa.’
As I learned later that night in a different bar the plant had opened recently, and its arrival had been contentious. The primary reason was “who it brought here.”
The next afternoon, waiting with me for the bus was another South Sudanese, a polite young man, the single one of us who didn’t smell like weed, wasn’t glued to their phone, didn’t spend the rest stops smoking/vaping, and who spent the five hours to Omaha looking out the window or reading the bible. I tried to speak to him, but he kept to himself, out of shyness and limited English.
Days later, reading articles3 on its arrival to North Platte, a town with few recent immigrants, it becomes clear “who it brought here” was indeed the entire issue, either couched in bureaucratic speak about “additional educational resources”, or directly, and more bluntly.
That’s not surprising, because immigration is the most contentious issue of our larval century, dominating U.S. politics, and every other nation, either explicitly as in Europe and North America, or simmering beneath the surface like in Asia, fueling the rise and fall of politicians across the globe.
Who you allow into your nation, how many and where from, and the rules they must follow until they are given citizenship (if ever) varies wildly, and yet in no country is it settled. It is not, to the chagrin of the political class, a solved issue, and while they may want to act like it is, it isn’t.
It is the biggest gulf between them and voters. The traditional political class, steeped in philosophical liberalism, are deeply convinced that increased immigration, under the auspices of human rights, is just, and opposition to that is naive, racist, and provincial. Borders, with tight limits on who can come and go, is the last domino to fall in their understanding of progress — the emancipation of all people from unnecessary, unjust, and outdated obligations, to be free to flourish. The concept of a nation with highly controlled borders, of citizens built around a shared culture, morality, and/or ethnicity, is to them one of those, an outdated, morally wrong, and immiserating political construct.
It is a moral fight to them, although there are more mundane and practical reasons for wanting to increase immigration, which is to fill jobs few others can, or want, to work: From Indonesian, Nepali, and Chinese 7-Eleven employees in Japan, to Mongolian assembly line workers in Korea, to Somalis in U.S. meat packing plants. That’s not necessarily hypocritical, because their understanding of freedom is inseparable from economic flourishing, and that is achieved through efficiency, including inexpensive labor.
It does however lead to absurd and gross cases, such as I saw this summer, of Australia hiring South Sudanese security guards for the outback. An attempt to use outsiders to address a seemingly intractable internal issue — import blacks to police other blacks, because the optics are presumably better, despite South Sudan and Aboriginals having little in common except skin color. A cynical racist policy of importing someone else to do a thankless job, all dressed up in the language of human rights and anti-racism4.
The voters, like in North Platte, are less convinced, and in many cases, are in open rebellion against it, still attached to the idea of a nation as something more meaningful than an opportunistic union of a shared currency, laws, and regulations.
It’s the only political issue people talk to me about unprompted across the globe, from questions of “can you help me get to the U.S.” in Uganda, China, and Cambodia, to soliloquies on “why do we keep letting those people come here” in U.S., France, Korea and U.K.
I’ve heard and seen both sides of the debate, from all involved, often discussed in far blunter and cruder terms than the political class would allow. From a young Brazilian woman in Dover, England working over the men in a Wetherspoons and the asylum act, who openly and giddily mocked the whole process by exclaiming she’d entered the country with her “pussy passport” which also entitled her to an apartment and stipend.
Or the Turkish and Congolese men in my Super 8 motel in El Paso who showed me Facebook posts that told them exactly what they needed to do, and then did — fly to Mexico, make your way to Juarez, then cross the border, claim asylum, get a court date, get released, and then ignore it. The red string bags slung over their shoulders, stuffed with toiletries, vouchers, and other goodies from NGOs, was an unexpected Easter egg.
Or the young black men in the Bronx who taunt the Yemenis working the bodega counter as “sand niggers” while tossing balled up dollar bills at them for loosies. Or the older men at a Maine McDonald’s, Québécois only a generation removed from immigrating themselves, one of whom declared, “Why are we giving anyone who comes here welfare? It is like putting out free food for stray animals” and another, “Nothing hides a bedbug better than a burka, they got African bedbugs that are breeding a super bedbug.”
While the debate might descend to the nasty, ugly, and inhuman, it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be had, or isn’t important. The idea of what a nation is, what it should be, and who can be a citizen, is as fundamental a question as there can be, and is rightfully the political question of the century.
It is the central question of every major work of political philosophy across history, including Aristotle’s Politics5, and almost every one of them understands for a political union to work, citizens need to be bound to each other by something other than government imposed regulations — without a shared culture, or moral code, or a concept of the public good, then it will devolve into either chaos, or authoritarianism. Order will either fall apart, or it will be imposed.
The question, 'In a country of three hundred million, when you can't possibly know every other citizen, why would anyone die (Marine for instance) to protect the others?' was raised in Benedict Anderson's 1983 book Imagined Communities. His answer—that nations create solidarity through shared imagination—has been twisted by our current political elites into a dismissal of nationalism as mere constructed irrationality, rather than real, deeply felt bonds. Some academics go further, invoking terms like 'altruistic suicide', that is dying for your country, to pathologize what most humans understand as noble sacrifice.
It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of humans, an absurdly rationalist utilitarian one, that doesn’t recognize people need meaning, viewing them as selfish economic animals alone. People need more than wealth, they need to be part of a community, to be part of a shared purpose, even an “imagined” one.
Yet, as I’ve seen across the world, a shared culture, a shared sense of a public good, or a shared ethnicity (which is an extreme version of a shared culture) is anything but imagined. It is meaningful and essential, because people are not people without culture, everyone has one, and the culture they have is more essential to who they are than their physical form. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz notes, “In Java, for example, the people quite flatly say, “To be human is to be Javanese.”
But this is where the current debate goes wrong. There are two levels to what we call culture: the thick and the thin. To quote myself,
Thin culture is the surface stuff—fashion, food, music. Thick culture is deeper: What is the Good? What makes life worth living? What should we aspire to become?"
Thick culture is the plot we follow, while thin culture is the stage settings.
For a nation to work, citizens must have a shared thick culture, and that means for immigration to work, to not upset the “imagined community” they must have the same thick culture, or quickly assimilate into one.
How quickly, and how much thin cultural differences other citizens will tolerate from immigrants depends on the country. Japan tolerates little thin differences, and that intolerance is who they are. Being Japanese, and all that implies, is their glue, and so they take in very few immigrants, with strict boundaries, and almost never let one become a citizen.
But in the U.S., which as I’ve argued many times before, where the American Dream is our shared thick culture, where immigration is really “who we are”, we are very forgiving of thin differences, as long as you buy-in (assimilate) to the thick. That is, you can live how you want, eat what you want, live (up to a point) how you want at a thin level, as long as you ultimately believe in making big money through hard work and playing by the rules6.
America is the world’s most tolerant nation — at a thin level. That doesn’t mean boundless immigration, because behind that tolerance is the understanding new arrivals share our thick culture, either immediately or they will quickly assimilate to it, and that requires being selective, about who, and how many.
For almost all our history, immigrants have assimilated at that level, and the vast majority still do, but the notion that we should accept those who have no interest in sharing our culture at a thick level, as has recently been argued7, is a complete misunderstanding of what makes America work.
It is a corrosive idea, that if allowed to come to fruition, will result in an ugly backlash that will collapse our house of tolerance. As Popper noted eighty years ago, the paradox of tolerance is that unlimited tolerance will lead to the disappearance of tolerance. You cannot tolerate intolerance. Or, you can’t let people into your country who actively hate it, or don’t buy into its project, which in the U.S. case is understanding, and believing in the American Dream.
If you immigrate to a country, you have an obligation to assimilate to the level they require (U.S. thick only, Japan thick and thin), because what holds a nation together is the imagined community.
And the idea of a nation isn’t dead, and shouldn’t be. Nations are not an outdated idea to move beyond, because without them, in our secular modern world, then there is nothing else that gives people meaning, and people need more than the economic.
They need to feel a valued member of something larger than themselves, and that is ultimately what countries have been, and still can be, if they choose to be.
PS: I leave next week to walk from Ulm to Munich. I’ll be starting from Ulm on the 13th, and hopefully will reach Munich in about a week. As usual, if you are around, would love to meet up, or have you join me for a walk.
I will announce, when I know timing better, a meet up in Munich. At a good beer garden. Should be around the weekend of the 23rd.
This is an exact quote from a decade ago, when I was in Lexington, another meat packing town, interviewing locals.
I was caught off guard by this, and so the dialogue is reconstructed from memory and a few contemporaneous notes I jotted down.
I learned more about the plant days later from a reader in Omaha, who directed me to a series of articles on it. Here are the links: Meatpacking 1, Meatpacking 2, Meatpacking 3.
Company officials have said the operation would attract a few hundred laborers already living in a 60-mile radius. That includes Lexington, home to a large meatpacking plant that opened in 1990 and is run by Tyson.
Some North Platte residents view Lexington as a cautionary tale. Serious crime soared countywide during a 10-year period that straddled the opening, according to a 1998 Government Accountability Office report examining the impact of two dozen meatpacking plants in Nebraska and Iowa. The report said police officials attributed some of the increased crime to plant workers, though people who committed crimes weren’t tracked by their place of employment. Once mostly white, Lexington is now 65% Hispanic.
The Episcopal Church of Our Savior in North Platte hosted a discussion in 2023 with people who lived through Lexington’s transformation. Panelists recounted hiring interpreters and teaching newcomers to operate household appliances or get driver’s licenses, Rev. Steve Meysing recalled. Over time, through trial and error, they said, Lexington became a vibrant multicultural community.
I was all the more annoyed when my last morning in Australia I went to my usual cafe to say goodbye to the lovely couple (Vietnamese, on temporary work visa). A well-educated elderly man overheard our conversation and said “given what is going on in your country he wouldn’t go back” and when I asked, “what exactly” and he mentioned immigration issues. I bit my tongue rather than remind him that Australia immediately sends any immigrants who land on their shores (including boats of refugees) to an island secure facility, before returning them to where they came from. Few countries are as hard on people who arrive without first going through legal channels.
I’ve spent the last few months reading Politics with the Catherine Project, an online great books program. I encourage everyone to check them out, and sign up with them. I’ve now done ten books with them over four years, and the weekly zoom calls are the highlight of my week.
That is especially true of highly educated immigrants, since they are drawn to the US, because they are leaving cultures they didn’t fit into at a thick level (entrepreneurial). They have self selected for being a natural American, at a thick level.
This argument was framed around the question of Muslims. I certainly don't believe Muslims, simply by their faith, are excluded from our thick culture, as I’ve witnessed across many U.S. mosques. Up to a point though, because when it pushes to the extreme and questions the American Dream, or a tolerance for other faiths, then yes, But that is true of all religions, and ideologies.
As I’ve argued before, the American Dream is best summarized as Careerist Christianity—a prosperity theology which synthesizes a moral order built on the Old Testament, overlaid with a heavy dose of Lockean individualism and Enlightenment rationalism.
The Muslim faith is a sibling religion to Christianity, built atop the Old Testament, and so it can easily fit America.
It’s good to distinguish, as you do here, between the need for meaning and the need for community. This was also an important thesis of Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's book The Mattering Instinct.
Some people can get by very well with an extremely limited social life so long as their sense of purpose is fulfilled by their work.
Others might feel unable to function even in doing what for them is the most meaningful work of their lives without some companionship.
These are independent human needs and are not always or even usually fulfilled by the same community. This multifaceted aspect of self is part of what makes humans endlessly surprising as a subject of study. We might feel at times that we barely know ourselves.
I would argue that what you call an "imagined community" is an example of a "common knowledge" (in the technical, philosophical sense) as institution (in the institutional economic sense). An imagined community is a metastable state that exists only for so long as the people who constitute it have the energy to maintain it. But these states serve in some sense as an information processing mechanism that performs in competition with alternatives (other "imagined communities"). So it's not just the available energy budget but the adaptability to changes in the environment and the life cycle of group members that determines how long these metastable states persist before they (inevitably) collapse back into chaos. https://www.symmetrybroken.com/maintaining-divergence/
All communities are subject to the decisions of outsiders. This is a concept I articulated in 1979 as I was completing the study I'd proposed for the Impact of the completion of Interstate 66 in Virginia, between Gainesville and Front Royal.
The Northern Shenandoah Valley, Virginia Sub-State Planning District 7, delineated in 1968, was 60 miles west of Washington, DC. The route had been on the 1956 National Defense Highway System map.
It was to be used for evacuation of DC in event of the highly anticipated surprise Soviet first strike Nuclear Attack. There was a Mid-Atlantic Continuity of Government plan that involved use of the hinterlands. It was more detailed than that prior to WWs I and II.
The American Viscose rayon plant was opened in Front Royal in 1938 by a UK firm. They needed a protected location and FDR recommended the Town. The environmental impact of the process chemicals killed most of the fish in the South Fork and much of the Main Stem of the Shenandoah River. It would be at the end of when fishermen advocated for a Virginia Department of the Environment to protect the waters.
As it turned out, many decisions were made by land developers when the route was put on the map. Second home developments quickly sprang up. County governments had minimal if any requirements. Homeowners Associations would handle subdivision infrastructure. For many, rural land somewhat distant from the central city was a Cold War bug-out that also had recreational and retirement potential, even though there were no urban services.
County governments wanted population growth and work for their citizens. Just like with the rayon plant, new development and new people would challenge local values. Still, growth and prosperity was the vision. Outside investment, State and Federal public investment was key to private investment following. Some environmental quality sacrifice is just how the world worked.
When I-66 was completed in 1980, the US was in a recession. The new route bypassed Front Royal, meaning it suffered like the Towns and Cities on US Route 11 when I-81 was completed in the 1960s. This occurred throughout the US. There was no boom and few of the earlier subdivisions ever built-out.
Outside interests continued opening and closing industrial operations, putting the local workforce into constant retraining and mandatory overtime as plants needed to meet the ROI on distant MBA spreadsheets. Illegal immigration began to show up in the 1990s. The industries that benefited lobbied against funding enforcement. Outsiders affect all kinds of decisions at many levels. Those without political power get the impact. Metropolitan suburbs remain protected.